DAVID FIELD WASHINGTON
For the US Congress, a wartime footing has meant grit, resolve, Churchillian flourishes and above all cries for bi-partisan co-operation. However, cracks have begun to appear.
The fine rhetoric has quickly dissolved into the partisan tradition, with the split coming over the airlines and their workers. Most crises produce calls for co-operation between the two major US parties, and the 11 September attacks brought widespread hope that Capitol Hill would capture the new sense of community. Congressmen even agreed to drop pet projects from the annual spending bills to expedite wartime legislation.
At first this did happen - arguments against "big government" were not even raised, and the $15 billion airline bailout package sailed through in a mere seven days, which in legislative terms is extremely quick. That pales in comparison with the time it took Congress to act on an airport security bill, with it taking three weeks just to start the debate in the Senate.
The breakdown in bi-partisanship centred on the fact that the measures would involve increasing both the federal payroll and government support of the private payroll by making all 27,000 airport screeners into US employees, and paying 100,000 airline workers who had been made redundant.
The new spirit has broken down quickly as Democratic senators could not resist adding 27,000-plus workers to the ranks of federal employee unions. Two weeks of debate was peppered with long suspensions of business while back-room bargains were made over a plan pushed by Senator Jean Carnahan, a Missouri Democrat, to add $1.9 billion to the bill to pay laid-off workers.
Carnahan refused, as was her right, to allow the Senate's airport security bill to move without her addition. Frustrated by this, the soon-to-retire Texas Republican Sen Phil Gramm took to the floor and said that if the airports screening bill was going to be turned into a jobs bill, he would also make it an energy security bill. Gramm then offered an amendment to the security measure that would have opened 810Ha (2,000 acres) of Alaskan terrain up to oil and gas drilling. Energy security, he said, has a lot more to do with security than unemployment payments. He then offered to withdraw his drilling measure if Carnahan dropped her jobs one. Gramm had made his point - if Carnahan was going to tack pet projects onto the bill, she risked others doing the same.
They both backed down - but not before Carnahan and her allies won promises that aid for redundant workers would be addressed in the House of Representatives. But opposition will not stop there. Don Young, an Alaskan Republican and chairman of the House's Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, vowed not to play ball if it meant creating a whole new federal workforce.
Some good may yet come out of breakdown in the spirit of co-operation. says Washington lawyer Ken Quinn, a former FAA general counsel, who lobbies for the newly created Aviation Security Association (ASA) that represents private screening firms. "There is a natural tendency at a time like this to come together, but they have come up with a solution that doesn't fit the problem," such as making all airport security workers into government employees, he says.
The ASA supports the approach of Young who has vowed to fight the Senate with his own bill giving the administration the choice of making the screeners public or private.
Source: Airline Business
